INSIGHT

Homily for 23 July 2020, Thursday of the 16th Week in Ordinary Time, Matthew 13:10-17

INSIGHT is an interesting English word. It puts two words together: SIGHT, meaning vision, and IN, meaning inside or within. Insight is about an inner kind of vision.

In our Gospel today, Jesus is explaining to his disciples why he speaks in parables instead of plain language. Perhaps to paraphrase his answer, what he’s trying to say is, “I want them to develop the gift of INSIGHT or activate their inner vision. That is not possible if you make things too obvious for them.”

Jesus used parables to make people think, to stir up their imagination, to let them develop insight. This is precisely the reason why Bible scholars doubt the originality of the texts where Jesus explains of interprets his parables. That’s a bit like telling a joke and then explaining the point of the joke. If you explain the joke, it means they did not get it.

Have you ever watched a movie and found yourself sometime reacting to the dialogue lines? Honestly, I sometimes get turned off, especially by some lines in Filipino movies where a character talks too much, or overexplains what’s going on inside her. Sometimes you hear lines like, “If it were only possible to open my heart to you, you would know the terrible suffering that you’ve caused me. You have no idea how very very painful it is.” When they start to talk that way, I get disappointed and am tempted to say, “Oh ok. You could have left it to the capacity of the actor to act it you without saying it. You could have left some of it to the intelligence of the viewer.”

Sometimes the facial expression, the anguished silence, the looks of the eyes, the tone of the voice, or even the surrounding images can supply what is does not need to be said. This is precisely the problem with the audiovisual culture that the present generation is becoming more and more dependent on. Nowadays, to get people to read a text in black and white, you have to accompany it with a picture, or a video, or any illustration.

I know some people who can no longer read beyond one or two paragraphs. They get tired after a few lines, if there are no pictures or sounds or visuals. The black and white print no longer attracts because they still have to put the words together into sentences inorder to understand what the writer is trying to say. The audiovisual culture short cuts that. It can make people lazy, unable to activate their imagination, unable to visualize it mentally until the reader is actually able to say, “I see.”

Maybe that is why some people become “gullible.” That is the adjective for people who are easily fooled by pranksters, or scammers, or swindlers. What seems so obvious to you might not be obvious at all to a gullible person. They are the type who will share fake news more quickly, or the kind who can be easily influenced by the comments of trolls—which they would take as public opinion.

There are people who have no sense of discernment. They can even be very stubborn with their views, or you hear them mouthing propaganda, or laughing at jokes that are not funny at all, or easily persuaded by simplistic solutions for complex social problems.

One time I heard a speaker use the word DUMBING. I thought he had merely mispronounced DAMNING, until I realized he was indeed talking about “DUMBING” the process of making people more and more stupid, or less and less capable of insight.

Sometimes you almost feel like shaking them and saying, “Hey guys, wake up! You’re being fooled. He’s pulling your leg.” The dumbing can be caused by fanaticism, or ideology, or a psychotic tendency that will color up one’s perception of reality.

Maybe because I was saw the transition from democracy to dictatorship and back, my generation was raised on vocabularies like “conscientize,” “awareness raising”, “social analysis,” “critical thinking”, or simply “woke”.

One time, Jesus got so exasperated about people asking him for a sign. At another time he said, “How come you are able to preempt the weather but are not able to interpret the signs of the times?”

For some people, a crisis or a painful experience can lead to conversion or a reorientation or a total renewal or judgment. Perhaps we can end this with the lines which I’ve heard many times from Pope Francis, “Sometimes we are able to see more clearly only through eyes washed by tears.”